They Came to Baghdad, Agatha Christie

I picked up They Came to Baghdad without knowing anything about it at a thrift store (how many of my book posts start this way?!). I've read (I think?) 3 other Agatha Christie books: one Marple, one Poirot, plus And Then There Were None -- and enjoyed them all to varying degrees. However, I admit I was a bit skeptical about They Came to Baghdad because it's a Cold War spy novel, set in the Middle East, not a detective novel and I just wasn't sure I trusted her with the genre. (I think I was afraid she would fall into the traps that Hitchcock fell into when he switched from murder mysteries to Cold War spy stories. And adding the Middle East locale had me concerned as well.) Anyway, while it did have a couple troublesome bits, it didn't do any of the things I feared it would do and I actually loved it. Mainly what I loved was the heroine, Victoria Jones, who manages to get herself into (and more importantly OUT OF) all kinds of trouble without having any particular skills beyond being able to fabricate stories convincingly. She reminded me a bit of my beloved Miss Fisher, except where Miss Fisher has a wide range of actual abilities, Victoria Jones just has a knack for faking it, which is almost more impressive. They share an impulsive, carefree quality coupled with unlikely (and largely unnoticed by others) good sense and quick-mindedness. Everyone underestimates Victoria and she plays that to her advantage incredibly well. This was a thoroughly enjoyable read.

The Marshal and the Madwoman, Blood Rain

I read back-to-back mystery novels set in Italy, so I'm writing about them together -- though that broad descriptor is about all they have in common. The Marshal and the Madwoman is set in Florence and features a Carabiniere from Sicily, while Blood Rain is set in Sicily and features a policeman from Venice. I was reading and enjoying the former when I found the latter in a thrift store, so I picked it up. My affection for Sicily was a factor in selecting it as well. I probably wouldn't have bought if it were set elsewhere in Italy -- which now that I write it, strikes me as a little odd, but certainly is true.

One idea that really struck me in The Marshal and the Madwoman was that each neighborhood in Florence is like a village. Everyone knows everything that goes on in their community, but another community just a few blocks away might as well be a distant town. Reading the book was like getting an intimate look at one of these tiny urban villages. When interviewed by the Carabiniere, the local bar owner says that his family has lived in this square of Florence for a notably long number of years (I forget exactly, but I think it was in the neighborhood of 180). Despite the close quarters, life in the city replicates life in the country. You get this village idea over again when at one point, the titular Marshal calls the local police and recognizes his interlocutor as a fellow Siracusan by his accent. When he realizes he's forgotten to get this officer's name, the Marshal asks his (also Siracusan) wife who knows exactly who the officer is and whom he is related to.

Blood Rain, by contrast, is about vast, overlapping conspiracies: the mafia, the government, the various police forces. It wasn't a particularly affectionate treatment of Sicily. The protagonist doesn't like Sicily, but I got the feeling that the author doesn't either. Valleta, Malta, where the protagonist spends some 24 hours mostly in a hotel room, is given about as much love as is Catania, where most of the book is set. (Unrelated: should I visit Malta?) Anyway, this book was an engaging. breezy read, but not much more.

Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie

I'll admit it: I'm selecting books I think will be quick reads to get in more books before the year is over. But I failed last week. I started reading The Talented Mr. Ripley and I had to stop. I often think about the fact that there are things I can handle in books but can't in movies (e.g., scariness), but I forget it goes the other way too. I've seen the 1999 movie of The Talented Mr. Ripley and, as I recall, I liked it. But at about 150 pages into the book, I thought: I can't manage another 200 pages of this tension. If it had been a movie, I would have only had another hour or so to endure, and that would have been fine. But 200 pages represents at least a few hours, and could stretch over days depending on my schedule, and I didn't feel up to it. To be fair, I had a rough week last week and it was on my commute home Friday evening that I decided I had to stop. Maybe if I had been in a better mood it would have been okay.

So, when I went out again after getting home Friday evening, I picked up a new book to read on my way. Something I thought would be safely distracting. In October I read and enjoyed Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, so last week I picked up the other two books in the trilogy and I started in on Ancillary Sword on Friday evening and finished it less than 48 hours later. I didn't like it quite as much as Ancillary Justice, but almost. I'll probably read the third book in the trilogy before the year is up.

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

Everyone is right: this book is great. I somehow knew (or certainly hoped) before picking it up that it would be just the kind of book I like to curl up with and read straight through, and that's pretty much what I did. I read it over two days when I was sick with a cold and it was just the right book for that. I think it would have been good under other circumstances too, but it was absolutely perfect for the circumstances I was in.

Having finished All the Light We Cannot See, I have nothing particular to say about it. I was contemplating, yesterday morning, what I might possibly write about it and I thought of my ex-husband who had a complaint about some books that I used to tease him about: he didn't like that he liked them. The only specific time I remember him voicing this complaint was while reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. A friend gave me a copy of the book and I devoured it then passed it along to my ex. Like me, he couldn't put it down, but it made him so mad! He felt like he was being emotionally manipulated (I suppose he was) and it drove him crazy. In the end, I think he would have said that he didn't like the book, because he didn't like what it did to him. I, on the other hand, love books that drag me in and don't let me go. All the Light We Cannot See wasn't an extreme example of this, but it was the kind of book I could throw myself into for two straight days without coming up for air.

Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera

I don't even remember how I first heard about Signs Preceding the End of the World except that it was when I was looking for Mexican books to read ahead of my trip to Mexico a little over a year ago. I added it to my PaperbackSwap wishlist, read 4 other Mexican novels, and forgot about it. Then a couple weeks ago it became available on PaperbackSwap so I ordered it, even though I was no longer actively seeking Mexican novels. It's a slim book about a young woman who is sent on an errand by her mother to travel across Mexico and over the U.S. border to bring her brother a message. Although the story is fairly straightforward, the tone of the narration is almost mythological. The style of narration gives the reader the opportunity to see the some of the strangeness of the U.S. through the eyes of an outsider. This is a lovely book.

The Fortress, Meša Selimović

I picked up The Fortress at a library sale over the summer. I had not heard of it, but the back cover said that Meša Selimović was "one of the most significant writers to emerge from Bosnia and Herzegovina," which was good enough reason for me to buy it. When I got home, I realized that I already had Selimović on my world books to read list, though the book I had noted down was Death and the Dervish. The Fortress is set in eighteenth century Sarajevo, then part of the Ottoman Empire, and was originally published in 1970. The narrator has returned to Sarajevo as the sole survivor from his military unit after serving in the war with Russia. The book follows his return to humanity, where he finds himself at the center of events that don't really have anything to do with him. He is shunned, accused of conspiracy, spied upon, but also finds love and friendship in places. He is left again and again to choose between two terrible options, or with no choice at all. I wish I knew more about Yugoslavia because I imagine the acts attributed to the local and Ottoman regimes in the book probably had parallels in then present day Yugoslavia. Even lacking that history, I found The Fortress interesting and moving.

The Story of a Child, Pierre Loti

I read The Story of a Child along with a short story, The Child in the House, by Walter Pater, for my reading around Proust book club. They were strikingly similar to one another - and also to Proust - in their approach to memory of childhood. As I tweeted while reading it, I would highly recommend the Loti to anyone who has considered reading Proust but would like to read roughly 150 pages rather than 4000+ pages. It doesn't have the descriptions of society, the cast of characters, the families across generations that you find in Proust. But Loti's descriptions of his memory of childhood is as evocative as Proust. Furthermore, Loti's narrative gives some examples of that idea of memoire involuntaire we think of as so Proustian. Of course we know that Proust didn't invent the idea of mnemonic associations, but it's striking because Loti's The Story of a Child was published some 15 years before Swann's Way. In conclusion, this is a lovely little book that made me want to visit all the locales in rural France described therein. It also made me want to try to reconstruct my own childhood in this manner. Perhaps this is a project for 2017.

Conveniently for anyone who wants to read it, The Story of a Child is available for free here.

The Blind Assassin, Ancillary Justice, In the Dutch Mountains

I'm killing three birds (books) with one stone (blog post) because I let myself get way behind.

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
Somehow or other, I reached age 40 without having read Margaret Atwood. In my head, I lump her with some other generally well-regarded, contemporary women writers who probably have little in common except that I haven't read them. (Also on this in-my-head list is Barbara Kingsolver, who when you google her, suggests Atwood as the second "people also search for" person, so maybe it's not all in my head?) I never gave Atwood much thought either way until a respected acquaintance recommended Oryx and Crake to me a couple years back. Several months ago I found a copy of it at a thrift store, so I picked it up. Then shortly after that I found a copy of The Blind Assassin at a thrift store, so I picked it up too. I was probably swayed by the Booker Prize winner status of the latter when I chose to read it rather than the book that had been recommended to me. In the end, I really liked it, but I found stretches of it a bit of a slog. (Or maybe I should say I really liked the end but found stretches of it a slog.)

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
About 70 pages into reading Ancillary Justice, my purse was stolen and I lost it. After my drivers' license and passport, it was the first thing I replaced. (While listing the things I had lost, I recommended it to the woman who took down my insurance claim over the phone. I subsequently recommended it to my stepfather, who was stuck at home with two broken arms, and he read it then promptly went on to read the two additional books in the series, which I was very tempted to do when I finished it too.) I don't read a lot of Sci Fi and when I try to talk about it, I often feel like a little out of my depth: how do I know if something is novel? maybe there are common tropes in the genre but I just don't know? (Who am I kidding, definitely there are.) But ANYWAY, this book kind of blew my mind in a couple specific ways: (1) the AI with no center -- the idea of a mind shared among several entities; (2) the use of she/her gender pronouns regardless of gender (because the AI can't distinguish well), which affected how I visualized the worlds. In short, I really enjoyed this and I would like to read the other books in the series.

In the Dutch Mountains, Cees Nooteboom
I probably should have written about this right when I finished it because I'm already having a hard time remembering it. I read In the Dutch Mountains over 3 days while I was waiting for my replacement copy of Ancillary Justice to arrive. It's a short novel I picked up at a used bookstore in LA without knowing a thing about it in order to check the Netherlands off my list. The blurb described this as a fairy tale, and parts of it were definitely fairy-tale-ish. The book is set in a fictional south of the Netherlands, a Netherlands much larger than the actual Netherlands, and narrated by a Spanish writer/roadbuilder, making it a somewhat odd representative book for the Netherlands. Apart from telling the story, the narrator went off on a lot of long tangents about the process of telling the story, which were part fascinating and part annoying. However, without them, the story itself would have been quite light.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Jose Saramago

I had hoped to check Portugal off my to-read list before going to Portugal earlier this month, but instead I carried this book around with me for nearly a month, on three different trips - including my trip to Portugal - and only finally finished it today. (I'm also 3 books behind in my short posts about books, but I wanted to get to this one while it was fresh in my memory.) The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was actually the third Portuguese novel I started. I tried Baltasar and Blimunda several years ago but had a hard time getting into it and then I started The Book of Disquiet earlier this year, but found it wasn't good subway reading making it difficult for me to read it at all. Anyway, I loved The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. It was slow going, and not only because I was reading it during a very busy month of my life -- it's very dense, but the language is beautiful and the text is uncommonly thoughtful. It was a bit strange to read because of the familiarity of the stories. I probably haven't read anything from the New Testament in more than 20 years, but I was once pretty familiar with it. This left me with the feeling of reading something I already knew but only faintly remembered. And, of course, there are differences. The most powerful and moving part of the book for me was when Jesus made God list for him all the people that would die in his name. There are lots of reasons, I'm sure, that this book angered the Catholic Church, but when I got to this section, I was floored. It reminded me a bit of the 200-page chronicling of murdered women in 2666. Though much less detailed and smaller in scale -- this only went on for maybe 4 pages -- the methodical listing of martyrs and their cause of death really drove the point home. I sort of feel like I have to go back and read the four gospels again now.

John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead

It felt like it had been forever since I'd written up a book, so I just checked to see if I was up to date and I was not! I finished John Henry Days 3 weeks ago, but the 3 weeks since then have been busy. I was out of town for about half that time and before I went out of town I was doing things to prepare and since I got back I've been recovering and so I'm only getting to John Henry Days now, when it is not at all fresh in my memory. However, I really enjoyed the way this book was composed.

The main events of the book relate to the celebration around the issuing of a John Henry commemorative stamp, but it goes off on some tangents about the historical John Henry and more modern attempts to learn more about him (among other things). Going into the book, I had -- as probably many readers would -- only a vague idea of who John Henry was and what he did. The book not only counts on this, it plays it up. It opens with a series of recollections and hearsay about John Henry from supposed contemporaries or near contemporaries, all of which thoroughly contradict each other.

As to the composition that I enjoyed: Some books are like puzzles, with lots of little pieces that fit together to make the story whole at the end. This book was sort of like that, but not quite. It had some little pieces, but they were more like otherwise passing details from the main plot that were given an unexpected exposition. They didn't so much contribute to the events of the story as to give you a deeper sense of the characters' contexts (and the context the reader brings to the book as well).

The Dream of My Return, Horacio Castellanos Moya

The whole time I was reading this book (admittedly, not for very long because the book is very short) I kept thinking, "I love this book, but why???" Having finished it, I'm still not sure I can articulate what exactly I loved so much about it. 

Over Labor Day weekend, I was visiting friends in LA. They took me to the nice little Alias Books in Atwater Village, where I proceeded to scan the fiction section from A to about M (at which point we ran out of time and had to leave) looking for books from countries I hadn't read. I picked up two without knowing anything at all about them, including The Dream of My Return, which is to represent El Salvador.

It's a first-person narrative of a rather neurotic Salvadoran journalist living in Mexico City who is making plans to return to El Salvador as the civil war is on the verge of ending. Wild things that seem realistic and normal happen to him, he undergoes hypnotherapy, he overthinks everything. He's a cad, but relatable. I just liked him. And the book. It was just right. (It reminded me a bit of Bolaño, though I liked it better than the short fiction I've read by Bolaño (whose long fiction I adore). It made me want to go back to Mexico City!)

Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, Louis Begley

Before I get into my review, can I tell you the most crazy thing I learned from this book? It's that Emile Zola was maybe murdered for his support of Dreyfus. I had no idea!! (I hope this doesn't qualify as a spoiler? Sorry!!!)

I read this for, and then thoroughly discussed it with, my reading-around-Proust book club, so I'm not inclined to say a whole lot about it now. Prior to starting Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, my knowledge of the affair came primarily from reading Proust and Benjamin, and this book provided context that my other sources lacked. This was a thoroughly readable, just-in-depth-enough history of the events leading up to Dreyfus' arrest, his trials, the circumstances of his imprisonment, and his eventual exoneration.

On a side note: through much of the book, Begley draws parallels between the circumstances surrounding the Dreyfus affair and the 21st Century "war on terror," some of which seem a bit forced. Knowing what we do nearly 8 years later, I found it rather sad to read his preface, written on the eve of President Obama's inauguration, which focused on the prisoners at Guantanamo and the hope for them under the new administration.

Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton

I feel pretty dumb about this now, but I didn't realize Alan Paton was white until I googled him some chapters into my reading of Cry, the Beloved Country. I had a longish list of South African books I was considering -- titles by J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Foreigner, and Athol Fugard (whom I had also assumed was black for quite some time) -- and I thought to myself, maybe I should not choose a book by a white author to represent South Africa. Then I found a copy of Cry, the Beloved Country at a thrift store, and I thought, "perfect!" Joke was on me! At the same time, I had in the back of my head some faint memory of critiques I'd heard of the book. I couldn't remember any specifics, but having read the book now I can imagine what they were. (A certain elevation of Christian morals, a dose of "white man's burden" thinking, and just a general disposition toward conciliation, mainly.)

It's hard to read this book, nearly 70 years after it was originally published, and not reflect on the fact that the apartheid state in South Africa only strengthened in the decades following its publication. The book is hopeful, and you would like to believe that people would behave and come to mutual understanding in the face of tragedy, the way they did in the book, but history tells us this was not so. At the same time, this was published in 1948, at a time when European colonialism was firmly in place throughout Africa, and gave voice to some of its ill effects, bringing these to an audience that may not have been attentive to them before. It's hard to imagine what the book meant in its time.

The Vintner's Luck, Elizabeth Knox

I found The Vintner's Luck at a thrift store last week and bought it because I saw that the author was from New Zealand and that was a country I needed to read. A couple days later I started it and I quickly realized that the setting was early 19th Century France, not New Zealand. My early thought that the book might somehow still end up in New Zealand also seemed less and less likely as I read on. But I never said the books I read had to be about the countries they were selected to represent. So, although it was about a Burgundian vintner, I can now say I've read a book from New Zealand.*

This book was so unexpected at every turn. From the very beginning, things never went how I thought they would. It all started on like page 2 when an angel showed up. I didn't know this book was about an angel. (As I said, I got it at a thrift store and I knew nothing about it.) Quite unwittingly, I found myself reading yet another book that dealt with the difficulty of immortality. Anyway, the angel showed up, I was startled, and then everything continued to surprise me for another couple hundred pages. Every time I thought I knew how things would go, I was wrong. I know I'm dwelling on this, but it was striking! I know surprising isn't actually descriptive, so let's see: this book was lovely; the relationships were complex and fascinating; it dealt with love and aging and distance very tenderly; the treatment of angels and god and issues of the afterlife was interesting. It made me want to drink wine. I may have drunk some wine while reading it. I enjoyed it!

* Fwiw, a group of tourists from New Zealand do make an appearance at the very end of the book, but the fact that they are from New Zealand is utterly irrelevant to the plot.

No Children

I started this post about 9 months ago. At the end of 2015, I was writing quite a bit about the year that was ending: my travel, my reading projects. This was to be part of that year-in-review, under the title The Year I Came to Terms with Not Having Children or something. I got straight through the first part: the moment of realization, but almost immediately after that I got stuck. In the intervening time, I've opened it now and then and added little bits and taken away other little bits, but it hasn't actually changed much until today. Now I think it's time to accept that, even if I have more I might say on the topic, it's all really directed at myself anyway; that this is enough and I can just stop. So, here we go:

I can pinpoint the moment I came to terms with the idea of being childless. It was in July of last year and I was riding in a car with my dad somewhere in upstate New York. I had been restless for several months; or maybe years. I was thinking about selling my apartment, paying off all my debts, and moving somewhere cheap. I'd been floating this idea off and on for some time, and last summer it was very much on. Anyway, I was in the car with my dad driving through a lovely part of upstate New York and it hit me in a way it had never hit me before. I could sell my apartment and walk away from everything if I wanted. I could do whatever I wanted. I could move anywhere. I would never have to pay anyone else's college tuition. (For some reason the college tuition thing hit particularly hard; that was the singular thought that crystallized it all for me.) I realized that I only had to worry about getting myself by until, well, death and doing that didn't sound so hard. That may come off as selfish or morbid or both. But I felt like a huge weight was suddenly lifted off me.

I wanted kids. I was 23 when my ex-husband proposed to me and before I accepted, I said, "You know I want kids." I was married to him for 6 years. They were all financially insecure years and kids were always presumed to be in the future for us, until there was no future for us.

In the 10 years since we split up, I've been in a couple relationships, but mostly I've been single. The idea that having kids might not be in the cards for me (at least in the conditions I'd imagined: natural children who were the product of a relationship) first hit me around the time I turned 35. At the time, it was just one part of a larger life reevaluation. I realized I was not at all where I had expected to be at that age and decided to make some changes. The big change I made was going back to school for a master's degree, something I never thought I'd do. I figured that if my personal life wasn't where I wanted it to be, I might as well throw myself into my professional life. I told a few people at the time that I was starting to accept I might never have kids. I think I was testing the idea to see how it felt. The universal reaction at the time was that I was speaking too soon, that I had plenty of time. These days people don't say that. I'm 40 and very single (not in the 'dates a lot' way, these days, but in the 'doesn't date at all' way), so it's hard to argue with. When I still hoped I might have kids, I used to mentally give myself until 42 -- the age at which a former supervisor of mine got pregnant after marrying for the first time at 40 -- but turning 40 (in fact, being 39 and anticipating 40 on the horizon) seemed like a good enough time to just call it.

Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

I've had Wide Sargasso Sea on my shelves for years. I picked it up at some point before I knew anything about it, maybe because of its inclusion on the (deeply flawed) Modern Library list of 100 best novels? I don't really recall. I do remember pulling it out several years ago as something to possibly read, then seeing its connection to Jane Eyre in the blurb and thinking I should probably wait to read it until after I'd read Jane Eyre, so I would have the proper context. (If by chance you don't know, Wide Sargasso Sea creates a back story for the mad Creole woman in the attic in Jane Eyre.) In 2011, when I decided to catch up on all the 19th Century English literature I had somehow missed, I finally did read Jane Eyre. I didn't particularly like it, which made me not particularly inclined to read Wide Sargasso Sea (though I do recognize the flaw in that logic). Anyway, my world books reading project gave me a reason to finally read it (Dominica: check!) and I'm glad I did. The prose in Wide Sargasso Sea was lovely. The tropics sounded wild and beautiful and lush and a bit scary. It made me want to go back to Guadeloupe.

A book like this presents a sort of conundrum: it's hard to evaluate it on its own; should one even attempt to do so? When reading it, I found I sort of wished I didn't know the Jane Eyre connection. Of course, if I hadn't known it, the significance of certain descriptions and events in the book would have been lost on me. How would the end have felt different if I didn't know the result of the fire she starts?

A quick update on what I'm calling my world books project: I'm up to 44 countries read (out of my count of 212, so about 20%). So far this year, I've read books from 18 different countries, though not all of these were first books from those countries. I feel like this is "not bad" -- or maybe even "pretty good" -- on both fronts.

The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson

I felt I had been neglecting my World Books project, so yesterday morning, I pulled out every book I owned from a country I had not read and stacked them on my dining table. I then reorganized them in various ways, ending up sorting them by continent/region. Africa turned out to be the biggest stack, mainly because I have six South African novels vying for my selection. (The Africa stack also included a Senegalese, a Sudanese, and a Guinean book.) The Europe stack included two novels by Tove Jansson (Finland) - this one and Fair Play, which I picked up together at a thrift store near my office, a Portuguese novel, and a Bosnian novel. The Americas stack included two books by Jean Rhys and To Sir, With Love. The Asia stack consisted of just one book: a Nepalese collection of short stories, which I decided to save for my busy travel season this fall. I had originally intended to read the Bosnian book (The Fortress by Meša Selimović), but it was the longest of the books and I thought I should pick something shorter because I also have to read a book club book this month. It came down to a choice between Jansson and the Sudanese book (Season of Migration to the North), and I chose The True Deceiver after reading the first paragraph of all my options. (This is the normal final step in my book selection routine.) When I decided to read a small book, I didn't expect to finish it in a day, but between three commutes, reading on my lunch break, and some final reading at home yesterday evening, I got right through it, so here we are:

This book was small and intense and strange. It's a story about two women, one of whom (Katri) insinuates herself into the other's (Anna) life, and the bizarre, tense, frenmity that forms between them. As a woman who lives primarily alone, but frequently has her home invaded by guests, I could really relate to Anna. The presence of another person makes you self-conscious about your habits and routines; you perform normalcy for the strangers in your home. The way Anna's world falls apart, while nothing about her life actually changes, felt true and a little bit scary. Are the worlds we create for ourselves so fragile? I suspect they are.

The All Souls Trilogy, Deborah Harkness

I've been accused -- probably justifiably -- of being a snob. I've been known to be dismissive of genre fiction. I've tried to be better and less judgmental. The All Souls trilogy was a total departure from my normal reading material -- one that made me a bit uncomfortable. Their genre could be described as historical fantasy with a healthy dose of romance. The central characters are a witch and a vampire. Aside from Roald Dahl's The Witches, I don't think I'd ever read a witch book, and I'd definitely never read a vampire book before.

While I'm not the kind of person who ostentatiously reads ~literature~ on the subway (I mean, I do read literature on the subway, but not for the attention it gets me, if you see what I'm saying), I was self-conscious reading these books on the subway. I knew it was dumb to care, but when I read standing over people, I wondered what they thought of the back-cover blurbs about vampires and witches. When I read sitting next to people, I held the book close. God forbid someone should read one of the vampire-witch sex scenes over my shoulder.

But, um, let's see... I enjoyed these books. I devoured these books. I couldn't put them down. I think I liked the first book, A Discovery of Witches, the least. Of all of them, it was the most formulaic and romance-ish (but without the payoff, wtf?!). The second book, Shadow of Night, nearly all of which takes place in the 16th century (and in which the protagonists finally consummate their relationship), was fun! The final book in the trilogy, The Book of Life, was my favorite, and I read it over a period of less than 36 hours. I was so sad when I finished it. Plus the books were smart. Not, like, overly so, but smart enough. I could read more books like this. What are they?

The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell

"Ugh, I'm so ambivalent about David Mitchell," is not a feeling I was aware I had until I got a few pages into The Bone Clocks. But I had that feeling to a greater or lesser extent (which I guess is to be expected when the feeling in question is ambivalence) until I finished it last night. "Too clever by far!" was a thought that kept going through my head. "One trick pony!" was another. It irked me the way Mitchell name-dropped characters and stories from his other novels*. But... but... I really liked the book. Mitchell may have one trick**, but he does it very, very well. He creates characters you really care about, even when they're despicable. The Bone Clocks' ending, I thought, was perfect! (And this is saying a lot because endings, in particular, are something that I've always found unsatisfactory in Mitchell's other novels.)

On a side note, I'm still stalling on writing about the All Souls trilogy, but this book occasionally reminded me of it: the discussions of the challenges that come with immortality, the second sight, the telepathic communication, references to Oc, and other unexpected commonalities kept coming up.

* I suspect a younger me would have actually liked this device and felt cool to be in on the secret. Has something changed about me? These insertions just felt heavy-handed and coy. (Especially the Black Swan Green one that called out the book's title!)
** If you've read Cloud Atlas, that is the trick I mean. To be fair, I've read 5 of his novels, of which I would say 3 use this trick, one sort of uses this trick, and one does not use this trick.

Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa

Conversation in the Cathedral was a challenging read. Partly because I felt underinformed about Peruvian political history, but largely because it has a very confusing narrative style. For the first hundred (or couple hundred, if I'm honest) pages, I kept wishing it was one of those books that had a cast of characters that explains who's who and how they're all connected. New characters would pop up with no introduction. And aside from the little bits of the book that make up the present-day titular conversation (an actual conversation, between two people, at a bar called la Catedral), it was often hard to know when anything was taking place. (The bulk of the book's narrative spans a decade or so around the 1950s.) The same paragraph might include - in alternating sentences - multiple narratives, among different characters, around events taking place years apart. It takes effort to unpack, but the effort is worth it. The way the stories are woven together in the narrative reflects the complex interwoven relationships among the characters, and feels very true to life.

Conversation in the Cathedral is divided into four large sections and I found the reading easier after I got through the first section. I did something I rarely do while reading this book: I took breaks and read other books in between. Between the first and second sections, I read Richard Price's The Whites. Between the second and third sections, I read Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches, and between the third and fourth sections, I read the remaining two books in Deborah Harkness' All Souls trilogy. Part of me wishes I had read Conversation in the Cathedral straight through. I think I probably missed or lost some things by spacing it out the way I did. However, if I had read it straight through, I think I would have felt it was quite a slog. (I felt that way a bit anyway, and maybe it was exacerbated by the fact that it took me so long to finish... because I kept breaking to read other books?? idk.) Anyway, stopping in the midst of books is not something I do often. I did it earlier this year when I was reading The Obscene Bird of Night and I felt like it was the right decision at the time. The only other time I recall having done this successfully was many, many years ago when I read The Long Day Wanes. In that case, I stopped (at a well chosen, between "books" stopping point) without entirely intending to go back, and found I was really glad I did so. Maybe I should go back and read those last 150 pages of Moby Dick (which I abandoned in 2008)?

The Whites, Richard Price

I guess I've been avoiding writing about The Whites. It was well-written and the plot was super engaging and it all felt very real, but it also left kind of a bad taste in my mouth and I've been struggling to articulate why. This book was good, but it wasn't for me.

Maybe it hit too close to home: crime fiction that reads very true set where I live featuring extremely fallible NYPD cops is just a little too real for me. (Though I will say New York in the book felt a little more like the New York of my teenage years than current New York.) Maybe it was just a touch too dark and gritty for my taste. But my biggest complaint about The Whites was something very particular. The titular Whites are people whom the police know to be guilty of a horrific crime but who -- for one reason or another -- were not successfully prosecuted for that crime. Each of the officers at the center of the book has a personal white: the one who got away with it on their watch. What irked me was that there was no doubt. I kept waiting for the plot twist where the person whom the cop has long assumed killed a teen basketball player actually didn't, or regretted it, or wasn't just plain evil. And, well, that twist never came. Most of the characters in this book were really complex, conflicted people, but the whites were just straight-up bad guys with no real back story. It's true that (title aside) the book isn't really about the whites, but this just kept bugging me.

Funiculars I have funiculated

I haven't even been on that many funiculars.

I was well into my 30s before I totally registered what a funicular even was.

Then I had a crazy year (2012) where there seemed to be funiculars everywhere I went.

I think there are more, but these are the funiculars I have taken pictures of between Clare's Year of the Funicular and the present:

• Funiculee Funicular, Park City, Utah
• Bom Jesus do Monte Funicular, Braga, Portugal
• Funicular dos Guindais, Porto, Portugal
• Old Quebec Funicular, Quebec City, Canada
• Cremallera de Montserrat, Montserrat, Spain
• Funicular de Sant Joan, Montserrat, Spain
• Budapest Castle Hill Funicular, Budapest, Hungary

I love funiculars.

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

I read The Big Sleep a few years ago during a foray into genre fiction I was making at the time. I liked it fine, but I can't say it left much of an impression on me. Sometime later, someone I follow on Twitter recommended (generally, not to me personally, in the context of like, essential noir novels or somesuch) The Long Goodbye, so I added it to my PaperbackSwap wishlist and a couple weeks ago it showed up in my mailbox. The timing was perfect: June was a busy travel month for me and engrossing, plot-driven books are about the only books I can manage to read when I travel. (This was also the reason behind my selection of The Death of Roger Ackroyd immediately before The Long Goodbye. I finished both books on planes.)

For a long stretch as I was reading The Long Goodbye, things felt slightly familiar, but I wasn't certain that I had seen the movie. Then, when I was finally sure I had, I found that the book diverged quite a bit from what I remembered happening in the movie. I looked into this after the fact, and it turns out it's not so much that my memory is faulty but that the movie is quite different from the book. Several characters are missing from the movie and most notably, the ending - which I remembered and was expecting - is totally different. The mood of the movie is also different. As the Wikipedia page explains, the movie was updated to be set in the present day (1970s), when a character like Philip Marlowe was anachronistic. Anyway, the differences meant the book felt almost totally new to me.

So, about the book: I loved it. The writing was incredible. This is the language that is both imitated and spoofed in detective stories everywhere. Reading The Long Goodbye, I felt like I was experiencing the real thing for the first time. It was beautiful, and funny, and evocative, and stunning. I couldn't get over it. Everything else about the book felt sort of incidental. The story was good, but not nearly so good as the telling. Good or bad, I found I could read right past and forgive the flaws and bits that made me uncomfortable. It was just such a pleasure to read.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie

As I've discussed before, detective TV shows are like comfort food to me. However, as I've also discussed before (like one sentence later in the same post), I haven't read a lot of detective fiction. This was the third Agatha Christie novel I'd read and my first featuring Hercule Poirot.* It should come as no surprise that I have watched the full 70-episode run of the BBC Poirot series. Luckily for me, they all sort of muddle together so I can read the books without remembering whodunit. When I started The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I immediately remembered which episode it was (the one where Poirot decides to retire to the country!), but I didn't remember the crime at all.

To read Poirot after watching hours upon hours of the TV show was a little surreal. I could see and hear David Suchet perform every affectation written on the page. I was almost surprised to find that I didn't feel this detracted from the book at all. What did surprise me was that the book was written in the first person by one of the other characters. It had never occurred to me that the Poirot books might be first person narratives. (While reading Roger Ackroyd, I inferred that many of the books are probably narrated by Captain Hastings.) Seeing this in action, it's clever and makes perfect sense. The narrator is in the same position as the reader: neither of you ever know quite what Poirot is up to until the big reveal. Anyway, it was fun to read this. Yay!

As an aside, I HIGHLY recommend this LA Review of Books article from a few years ago on the occasion of the end of the Poirot TV series, but about Poirot more broadly.


* I read And Then There Were None in middle school, adored it, and sought out another Agatha Christie novel at random. I don't remember which I ended up with, but it was a Poirot book and 13-year-old me just couldn't get into it. I don't think I quite got what Poirot was supposed to be. I never picked up a Christie book again until last year when I found a Miss Marple book at a thrift store, but I have watched every BBC adaptation of her books I can get my hands on.

Stoner, John Williams

When I was a kid, I thought the word melancholy sounded all wrong for what it meant. To me, melancholy sounded like a happy word and I thought it should represent a happy feeling. Many years later, by which time I had mostly reconciled myself to the definition of melancholy, I learned about literary traditions of melancholy, wherein it was seen as a mark of genius or a prerequisite to artistic production. This somehow jibed with my old childhood idea of melancholy, and so I've continued to think of melancholy as a sadness that is tinged with joy. The feeling of melancholy for me is similar to nostalgia, or the particular feeling of remembering past happiness in the face of loss, or simply the enjoyment that comes from wallowing in sad songs.

The overwhelming feeling I got while reading Stoner was melancholy. At times while reading it, I would think, "my god, how depressing," but I would read on and as I went I would find it not so depressing after all. What it really felt was normal and true. Stoner reads as the biography of a man who led a life that was more defined by frustration than fulfillment. He is constantly thwarted, but at the same time, you never feel he is all that disappointed in his lot. Which is not to say he's happy with it; it just is. In the end, I didn't even think the sadness quite outweighed the joy in this book, or maybe what joy there was seemed all the more joyful because of the pervasive sadness of the book. And that's what I liked best about the book; you could feel sorry for Stoner (and I definitely did - a lot!), but you could also read it and feel that this is what life is and that it's not so bad.

The City and the City, China Miéville

The City & the City is a total mind-fuck -- in the best possible way. It's a mystery novel set in two cities that share the same physical space (grosstopical space, in the language of the book), but are in fact in different countries. The mystery is not what's interesting about this book (in fact, I found it confusing and ultimately unsatisfying), but the fascinating conceit of these two overlapping cities nearly makes up for anything that's lacking in the plot. The citizens of each city must constantly "unsee" the people, buildings, vehicles of the other city. The idea of living in a city where you must studiously ignore something like half of what surrounds you seems like an incredible allegory of urban life. Besides urban life in general, I kept wondering what actual places informed the cities. Istanbul was the first place that came to mind. Also the states of what was Yugoslavia (which some clues in the book suggest may be the approximate location of the fictional cities). The idea of a city overlaid on a city felt very familiar, but I couldn't pinpoint from where.

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

I loved this book.

In the Country of Men, Hisham Matar

Although I told myself -- and my reading public (ha!) -- that I wasn't going to limit or pressure myself into reading only books from countries I hadn't read before, I was starting to feel like I'd been reading too much in familiar territory. The prior 6 books I read were from countries I'd read before -- one was even a book I'd read before. Somewhere in the middle of that run, I started, then set aside, a book from a country I had not read. So, when I finished My Brilliant Friend and was on the fence about whether I should go straight into the next book of the Neapolitan Series, I decided instead I should check off another country from my list. To that end, I pulled out In the Country of Men, which I had picked up several months ago to represent Libya.

One thing this book brought to my attention is I don't know much of anything about Libya or its history. At some point I must have learned it had been an Italian colony (as a student of Africana Studies, I had to know all the African countries' colonial histories, though my coursework tended to emphasize sub-Saharan Africa), but that knowledge was long gone when I read this book. (Oddly, because I remember as a child thinking the name Tripoli sounded Italian, which of course it's not, but this association seems like it could have served me mnemonically.) I had no idea that it had a Roman history (which, again, should not have been so surprising, given all the Roman ruins I have personally visited in Morocco). I have what I have to admit is only the barest knowledge of the Gaddafi era. So, anyway, when I started this book and discovered it was set in the wake of the 1979 revolution, my initial reaction was, "Oh, they had one that year too?"

My ignorance of Libya aside, this book did a really good job of getting into the mind of a child who does foolish things that have potentially terrible consequences out of naivete, attention-craving, desire to please. I found the narrator's 9-year-old self often infuriating, but also utterly believable. Kids do dumb and mean things despite themselves. As you get into the narrator's head, you see that he has compassion, he just can't seem to show it. My frustration with him got in the way of my enjoyment of the book, though it was a times really lovely.

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

The last of the Neapolitan novels only came out a few months ago, but I feel like I'm late coming to Ferrante. Last year, she was everywhere and the near-universal praise of her books left me unsure whether I wanted to read or avoid them. My dad gave me the first three volumes, as well as her The Days of Abandonment, some time ago and they've been sitting on my shelf, largely forgotten, since. Last Friday scanning quickly for something to read, I first pulled out The Days of Abandonment, then wondered why I was putting off starting the Neapolitan novels and pulled out My Brilliant Friend instead. Some books are better than others for reading on the train, or other places where there are lots of potential distractions. Just before starting Ferrante, I tried for 2 days to read The Book of Disquiet on my commute, but I decided it was more of a weekend-in-a-cabin read than a subway read. My Brilliant Friend was totally absorbing. I read it from platform, to subway, to street during all my commutes for the last week. I read it for 2 hours in my doctor's waiting room despite the pop soundtrack in the background (something I would normally find exceedingly distracting). At the same time, I had no particular urge to read it once I was at home. (I did in fact finish it right before bed last night, but mostly to get it out of the way and start a fresh book this morning.) It's not usual for me to find a book so absorbing and yet not to want to lie on the couch and read it all day during the weekend. In the case of My Brilliant Friend, I think this has mostly to do with the simplicity - for lack of a better word - of the story. This isn't a criticism! There were life-changing events, there was drama, and yet it was somehow very quiet. I wasn't compelled to keep reading for hours to find out what happened next. Instead, I was content to put the book away when I got home and to be instantly reabsorbed in the book when I pulled it out on the subway the next morning.

Life After Life, Kate Atkinson

I always read a ton right at the end/beginning of a year and then I ease into a slower reading pace, which fluctuates a bit based on my travel schedule. (I have a habit, which I'm trying to improve, of carrying around books and never actually opening them when I travel. That actually happened to me with Life After Life, which I was reading in a hardback edition that I dutifully brought on a 4-day business trip to Washington, DC and never touched, not even on the train.) By the end of January of this year, I had already finished 7 books in 2016. In February, I read 4, March 3, and here we are nearing the end April, which is likely to be 3 again. (I had one false start in April, which maybe makes this number artificially low: I signed up for a Pulitzer Winners book club and thought I might actually join them in reading their April selection, The Confessions of Nat Turner. I read it for about 5 days, realized I would have to devote a whole weekend to reading it in order to finish it in time for the club meeting, and decided I didn't like it enough to do that; so I abandoned it at the end of its first section.) Anyway, my slower pace should make my task of writing a little something about each book easier, but I'm not sure if it does.

I picked up Life After Life after deciding to abandon Nat Turner because I wanted something that would absorb me, something I'd love. Up til now, I had only read Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie detective novels, so this was my first time reading her (to assign it a genre) literary fiction, but I was confident enough from my enjoyment of the Jackson Brodie novels that I would enjoy this. I have to admit, when I started the book, it was a little startling. (I knew nothing about it, which is often the case for me when I start books: I avoid reading reviews or even back-cover blurbs; it's hard to explain.) Anyway, Life After Life played with reality in a way I wasn't anticipating, but which I'm sure anyone who has read even a cursory description of the book would know. The book started over and over and, especially at the beginning, often didn't get very far before starting again. I was immediately absorbed - the way I wanted to be - but then I felt dropped when everything stopped and started over again. I did get to like it - love it - eventually, but it took a little while. My favorite thing about the book is that you, the reader, get to decide what to believe. You can choose the version of events -- the life -- that you like best. It's almost like an even less deterministic choose-your-own adventure.

Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen

I rarely reread books, but I pulled Pride & Prejudice off my shelf for a second reading this weekend because I was in the mood for comfort reading. I wanted to sit up in bed and read all day, and that is, in fact, pretty much how I spend my Sunday. Pride & Prejudice has often been something I've turned to for comfort, but not the book. I've spent many a sick, or sad, or hungover day watching the full 6-hours of the BBC miniseries, some episodes twice over. It was strange to reread the book being now so familiar with its content.

I read Pride & Prejudice for the first and only (until now) time in 2004, when I was 28. I somehow managed to get through all my schooling and early adulthood without ever having read Jane Austen, and I had also pretty much managed to avoid all the adaptations of her books (the only exception I can think of is Clueless). At the time, I was unemployed and living in a sublet and had run through the small collection of books I had that weren't in storage, so I pulled Pride & Prejudice from the small fiction collection I found in my sublet apartment.* I wasn't expecting to, but I loved it. I didn't know it would be so accessible, so funny. At the time, I had read hardly any 19th century English literature at all and I lumped the Brontës and Jane Austen (and all the rest of it, really) together in my head and it just didn't interest me. Reading Pride & Prejudice changed my whole perspective. I went on to read every other Jane Austen book in quick succession and a few years later I spent a year reading almost exclusively 19th century English literature and who knows if I would have done any of this if I had not picked Pride & Prejudice off the shelf in my sublet.

Between 2004 and now, I also became quite a consumer of Jane Austen adaptations for film and TV. I go to them again and again for comfort viewing and, especially, to the Pride & Prejudice BBC miniseries. I know it nearly by heart. When I started the book again, my first thought was that it felt clunky and stiff, compared to what I had become so familiar with watching and hearing. I got over that and became absorbed in the book pretty quickly after the first chapter, but I never really got over knowing the lines already. I was surprised at how true the BBC series was to the book in language. I tried, as I was reading, to be particularly attentive to the bits that were left out of the miniseries to see if they gave a different sense of anything. Occasionally I was gratified.

In any case, it was a pleasure, and really was comforting, to reread Pride & Prejudice. Maybe I should reread books more often.


*This is also the story of how I started Proust, because P&P only kept me occupied for a couple days.

The Ruined Map, Kobo Abe

I found a copy of The Ruined Map in a church basement thrift store that only operates on Thursdays where the price of books is pay-what-you-want. Kobo Abe's name was faintly familiar to me, and the description sounded intriguing, but mostly I liked the cover. This is only the second Japanese novel I've read (when I first started my world books project, Teru Miyamoto's Kinshu: Autumn Brocade was the first book I read as part of my undertaking). The Ruined Map is a roughly 300-page detective novel, the first 275 pages of which read much like any detective novel (though with some gorgeous imagery and some distinctly Japanese events) and then the last 25 pages just kind of blow your mind. At least, they blew my mind. It was confusing as hell, but I really liked the turn the book took at the end. Up until the end, I have to admit I found the book to be kind of a slog and occasionally a not-good kind of confusing. It's hard to explain without being explicit, but I wish the book had done what it did at the end earlier and more. As it is, my review of it would be The Ruined Map: I really liked the end.

The Obscene Bird of Night, José Donoso

I was about a hundred pages in -- maybe even at the end of the first section of The Obscene Bird of Night -- when I read the blurb on the back cover and said (possibly aloud), "wait, that's what this is about?" The blurb reads:

The story of the last member of the aristocratic Azcoitia family, a monstrous mutation protected from the knowledge of his deformity by being surrounded with other freaks as companions.

And, indeed, around the 180-page mark, this narrative does emerge from the confusing text as a suddenly clear story. Before long, this story is left behind, though it reappears a couple more times. This happened again and again in the book: I'd be lost for pages, or whole chapters, uncertain about who was telling the story, who was speaking, when and where the events were taking place, whether they were fiction within the fiction, and then there would be sudden, beautiful clarity.

The book cover also proclaims that it was Luis Buñuel's favorite novel. If that's true, it makes perfect sense. There were multiple ragged party scenes that could have been straight from "Viridiana." (Though, who knows if I would have thought of "Viridiana" if I hadn't seen Buñuel's name on the cover.)

Finishing this book felt like a huge weight off. As I mentioned in my post about The Kingdom of this World, it's decidedly not beach reading. It didn't even take me all that long to read (two and a half weeks, if you subtract the the week I set it aside.) The book was dense and easy to get lost in and when I did come upon one of those moments of clarity, I felt like I could breathe again, but I was always a little awestruck at the same time. I read roughly the last 100 pages in one go and felt so drained, but also pretty great, at the end of it all.

Breathing Room

I've had asthma my entire life. Since 1999, it has been well-controlled by daily use of an inhaled steroid, which has been supplemented with another daily medicine since 2005, when I started living with cats. I also have an albuterol inhaler, which is a fast-acting asthma treatment for use only when I am experiencing asthma symptoms. These last 17 years, I've needed it rarely. Even before 1999, I took medicine daily going back as far as I can remember. I probably tried every asthma treatment available in the 1980s and 90s. Back then, I used my albuterol inhaler frequently. I often used it up before I was eligible for a refill. I wheezed all winter; I ran out of breath from even mild physical activity; I woke up in the night needing to be rushed to the emergency room. None of these problems persisted after I started taking inhaled steroids and I hardly think about my asthma anymore. (Taking daily medicine is so routine for me, I don't give it a second thought; I have taken medicine literally every day for more than 35 years.)

It's easy to overlook, all these years later, how having asthma affected some of my major life events, particularly the effect it had on my professional life. It's true that having health insurance - particularly in the pre-Obamacare era - was a privilege, but not having health insurance was a privilege of its own sort; one I could never afford. I require daily medicine that would cost hundreds of dollars per month, if I had to pay out-of-pocket. If I were to forgo the medicine, I would likely need coverage for emergency room visits every few months. As long as I've been an adult, having health insurance has been very near the top of my priorities. When I left school with no degree to show for it, I headed straight for the temp agency affiliated with Harvard seeking any kind of job I could get, as long as it included health insurance. Sixteen years later, I realize this decision - spurred in the moment by a combination of practicality and fear - was the start of the career path I'm still on today. Now and then, I've wanted to take career risks, but asthma (or, more accurately, my need for asthma medication) has always given me pause. (I have had a handful of short stints without insurance in my adult life, which I've gotten through via a combination of medicine-hoarding and doctors' free samples.) Overall, I like my work and I'm not actually sure I would have done anything differently if, say, I lived in a country that provided healthcare. It would have been nice to feel I had the option.

Yuppies

The other night on the subway, two young women were talking derisively about yuppies. Then one of them asked what yuppie even stands for and they tried out possibilities. They knew the Y was for young, but beyond that, they were lost. Young Unemployed Privileged People, one guessed? They seemed pretty sure the U was for unemployed, which struck me because yuppies were decidedly not unemployed. I don't want to extrapolate too much from this, but I do think it's interesting. When the term was coined, the object of derision was people who worked -- probably long hours -- in high-paying jobs. Now it's people who are so privileged that they don't have to work who are despised.

The Kingdom of This World, Alejo Carpentier

I was a good chunk of the way in -- but still far from finishing -- José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night when a scheduled vacation in Guadeloupe was drawing close. I had started it optimistically thinking I could finish it before leaving, but I was only about a third of the way through. This was decidedly not what I wanted to be reading on vacation in the Caribbean. Luckily, I came to a break between parts and so I set it aside to be resumed when I returned from vacation. Of course, I was then faced with the dilemma of what to read on my trip. I picked Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World in part because it was about the Caribbean (pre and post revolutionary Haiti, to be precise) and in part because Carpentier is who got me interested in Guadeloupe (via his Explosion in a Cathedral) and in part because the edition I had was well worn and the book is slim and it seemed manageable for my short trip. As it happened, I didn't pick up the book once while in Guadeloupe, but between a bit of reading the day before my departure and on my flights to and from Pointe-a-Pitre, I finished it, so I think I made a good choice. (We'll ignore the fact that I brought a second book with me in case I finished the Carpentier while I was away - hahahahaaaa...)

I was kind of disappointed in this book. I think mostly because of its brevity, which is, of course, why I picked it up when I did, so it seems kind of dumb to complain about it, but here we are. I was very excited to read Carpentier's treatment of the Haitian Revolution, and it just seemed light. While reading it, I felt like I knew either too much or too little about the Haitian Revolution going in. If I had known less about it, I might not have been so occupied with what was going on when; as it was, I kept wanting to refer back to The Black Jacobins, which I now intend to reread. My disappointment aside, the prose and the imagery in The Kingdom of This World were lovely. The book is told largely from the perspective of the slave Ti Noel and covers a long span of his life, with big gaps. This may sound a little odd without context, but I found the end of the book, when Ti Noel gives up on humanity and takes on non-human forms, only to discover the challenges of them, to be especially beautiful.

Ilustrado, Miguel Syjuco

I read Ilustrado because of Jesse Eisenberg. Right around the time I was putting together my list of countries and books, there was an interview with him in the Times Book Review where he mentioned having left it on a plane the day before. I wasn't familiar with the book, so I looked it up and when I learned the author was Filipino, I added it to my list. A few months later I found a copy and last week I decided to pick it up. As has been the case with several of the countries I've read books from for this "project," Ilustrado brought to my attention how little I know about the history of the Philippines.*

There are a lot of pieces to this book -- and sometimes I wasn't at all clear how they fit in with the larger story -- but at the center is the narrator, a Filipino writer living in New York, who is writing a biography of an older Filipino writer who had also settled in New York and whose death seems unresolved. I love a literary detective story, but the thing I really liked about this book was how the narrator turns out to be a mystery himself. As you learn more and more about him over the course of the book, you're forced to go back and reassess who he is and why he's telling this story. It never quite resolves, but the story has a lovely way of unfolding.

*Also embarrassing: It took me 3 tries to spell Philippines correctly.

My Michael, Amos Oz

When I was compiling my list of countries and authors and books, I immediately put down Amos Oz for Israel. He'd been in the back of my mind as someone I should read for a long time, so he was the obvious choice for me. A few months later, I found a copy of My Michael for $1 at a thrift store and so my Israeli book was selected. I hesitated a little when I read the back cover blurb, which described the book as chronicling a woman falling out of love with her husband. An intimate book about a couple's relationship wasn't quite what I had in mind for my representative book for Israel. However — and in retrospect this seems obvious — My Michael was about much more than a couple's relationship.* The book takes place mostly in Jerusalem between 1950 and 1960: Israeli independence is new; Israel is being populated with Jews from across the diaspora; the Suez crisis happens. The book is intimate, but the outside world is everywhere in it.

* Similarly, the book I read from Japan was a very intimate book made up of letters between an ex husband and wife, and yet it also felt very much about Japan and life there in the 1980s.

Home, Marilynne Robinson

For the first hundred pages or so, as I was reading Home, I wished I had read it sooner after finishing Gilead, which I read a couple years ago. I found myself struggling to remember the characters and histories from the first book. I remembered some details, but not others. But as I read on, my memory and lack thereof started to feel right. It was at the moment that I realized the two books covered the same time period (which probably happened for me later in the book than it should have) that everything started to click. I knew one big secret, and knowing that made it feel like I was in on something. But other facts I had forgotten - or that simply weren't in Gilead - kept cropping up. The book covered familiar ground, but I learned new things and got a deeper understanding from it.

Marilynne Robinson seems to tell stories by first withholding information and then letting out little pieces bit by bit, and it's really lovely. In the case of Home, this method of storytelling seems particularly true to the characters and the reserve they have with each other. The secrecy and tender duplicity practiced by the characters in Home struck me as very Protestant and very familiar. This story felt like it could have taken place in some offshoot of my own family tree. One thing I loved about this book - and probably part of made it feel like my family - was the food. Every food Glory prepared in Home sounded like something my great aunt Gladys might have cooked up for a family meal.

Now I need to decide if I should read Lila right away or wait a couple years.

The Dog Stars, Peter Heller

It has been a long, long time since a book -- or anything really -- produce as strong an emotional response in me as The Dog Stars did. It hit me hard. I cried on the subway, I cried at work, I cried on the subway some more, I cried in bed, and I cried and cried on the couch with my therapist talking about loss and a future alone and going on despite everything. Either because of or despite the 36 hours of emotional anguish this book caused, I'm not entirely sure how I felt about it. It's hard to say that this was quite my favorite thing about the book, but I think the strongest thing about the book was that I really identified with the narrator. The book is set in a post pandemic future with few survivors, and yet I found the narrator's condition and response to be imaginable. Probably my favorite thing about the book was the dog (and the narrator's relationship to it). And (I don't think this is exactly a spoiler - you know it has to happen) that's why it broke my heart. Another thing I loved happens very late in the book when two lambs are relocated via small plane. The lambs freak out then calm down and narrator says something to the effect of, "for all they knew this was the next step in the normal life of a sheep" and I just loved that.

Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey

One day last week, I unexpectedly finished the book I was reading on my lunch break and I can't handle a bookless commute, so I went to the Goodwill to find something to read on my ride home. I should really plan better; I do this rather often.* I was definitely swayed by the quote on the cover claiming it was "one of the greatest mysteries of all time," but it's not really a mystery novel. I was not at all familiar with the history of Richard III and the two princes in the tower, so I wasn't even aware of the mystery at the center of the novel, which is presumably what is being referred to as among the greatest mysteries. I didn't love this book, but I do enjoy anything that includes a complicated family tree that I have to refer to again and again in the frontispiece.**


* I say this, but I'm not sure I mean it. I sort of love the randomness that comes with having to choose a book from an uncurated collection. I've ended up reading some very good books I might never have sought out specifically.

** I don't know which I like better: frontispiece family trees or frontispiece maps

The Jackson Brodie novels, Kate Atkinson

I'll still be a book behind, but I decided to kill 4 books with one post (or something) by writing about Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels all at once. I've read all four of them (Case Histories; One Good Turn; When Will There Be Good News?; and Started Early, Took My Dog) in the last 6 months and the last two in January of this year.

I started watching detective TV shows maybe 4 years ago and gradually they became the only TV shoes I could tolerate. I often half joke that I have terrible taste in television, but it's true that what I look for in TV is very different from what I look for in other entertainments. TV satisfies a certain mindless, escapist need for me. I don't like my TV to be too dark or too serious or too drawn out. I avoid programs that don't resolve in a single episode. Much of what is praised as the best television is just not for me. I like exactly the kind of detective programs that Kate Atkinson subtly derides here and there in her books: cozies set in English villages, especially if they're also period dramas. Not much gives me as much pure pleasure as a 90-minute murder-detection-resolution cycle. After a couple years of watching detective programs, I thought maybe I should give detective novels a try. I'm glad I did.

I have a much higher tolerance for dark and unresolved stories in books than I do in TV. It's a good thing because the Jackson Brodie books are, while not utterly grim, not the TV cozies I love either. (There is a BBC adaptation of the novels and I wonder if I would enjoy it; I suspect I might not -- the books are spread across several episodes apiece.) In my very limited reading within the genre, I've noticed there is a type of detective that shows up here and there who, unlike the masterful detectives of my preferred TV shows, does not have a particularly brilliant mind, but who does the grunt work of being a detective and kind of just happens to be in the right place at the right time to solve the crime. (If indeed he solves the crime at all.) Jackson Brodie is one of these. He seems to stumble into and out of most of his cases despite himself. It's not that he's a bad detective and it's not bumbling comic relief (though sometimes the absurd situations he finds himself in are laugh-inducing); if anything, this seems more realistic than the highly perceptive genius model of detective. While Brodie himself is reasonably sympathetic, it's the other characters that populate the books that I've found particularly compelling. I really enjoyed all four books, but without question my favorite was When Will There Be Good News?, which features two central characters who really drew me in: a smart, independent teenage girl who just needs a little stability in her life; and a woman with a seriously troubled childhood who has gotten her life totally together as an adult. These two - and especially their relationship with each other - kept me reading late into the night. But all the books feature compelling characters who have complicated, tender relationships among each other. When I finished the fourth book, I was very disappointed to discover there is not (yet, I hope!) another.

In a funny aside, I took a lunch break partway through writing this and after eating I went to a thrift store near my office where I sometimes go to browse during lunch. There was another woman looking at books there and she picked up a copy of One Good Turn. Of course I interjected and recommended it.

Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau

We're not even a full month into the new year, and I've already allowed myself to get behind in writing about the books I've read. Last weekend, I finished Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau. This takes care of one of the non-country countries on my books from every country list: Martinique, which is an overseas department of France. Unlike some books I've read in this ongoing project, this felt like a very good book to count as representative of the country (if any book can be so). It covers Martinican history from the latter part of the slave era up until the late 20th century. Although it's about a different place, it felt to me like Texaco picked up where Explosion in a Cathedral left off. Particularly in the early part of the book, the uncertain status of slaves as the island waited for word of abolition from mainland France, reminded me of the regular theme of waiting for news to cross the ocean in Explosion in a Cathedral.

I struggled a bit with Texaco. I would occasionally find myself reading for pages only to realize I had drifted off and didn't know what had happened. The book got easier to read toward the second half when the voice switched from the narrator's father, Esternome, to the narrator herself, Marie-Sophie (as told to an amanuensis). It's hard to say what my favorite thing about Texaco was. Esternome and Marie-Sophie were both extremely compelling. The book is about losing everything you have and having to start again, over and over and over. One of the lovely ideas in the book is how maintaining a connection to the past, remembering the old ways of doing things, makes that starting over possible. Much of the hope in the book comes from knowing it's been done before. It's a kind of unusual idea of progress.

The Infatuations, Javier Marías

This book was gorgeous. The writing, the themes that kept repeating: just beautiful. I'm not positive, but I think the thing I liked most in this book was a description of the aftermath of a death, all the little things that are left in a state of non-completion when death interrupts someone's life. Marías -- or the narrator -- refers to "the novel with the page turned down, which will remain unread, but also the medicines that have suddenly become utterly superfluous and that will soon have to be thrown away..." and many more things. The character in the novel has lost her husband, but I read that passage and immediately thought of the bottle of pills I got for my old cat's stomach illness two days before she died -- nearly a year ago. The almost full bottle is still sitting on top of my fridge. My cat aside, this book dealt in lovely detail with the space we take up in the world and what happens to the the people and objects we affect when death removes us.

The Storyteller, Mario Vargas Llosa

I was reading a friend's year in books post and he wrote, "if it is worth reading, it's worth jotting down at least 100 words about it" about his decision to start writing at least something short about every book he read last year. I think this is a really good point and, further, I feel like it's a good idea to help process a book upon finishing it. I find my mind swims a little just after I finish a book and I sort of stare off into space and then I start thinking about what I should read next. It's probably not a bad idea for me to spend a little more time with whatever it is I have just read. I decided, however, that I don't want to write reviews, per se, so I'm going to write instead about whatever it is I liked most in the book.

I have just finished reading The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa. (I can now check off Peru in my books of the world list.) A friend of mind loaned me (a different copy of) this book nearly 20 years ago, but I never read it at the time. When Vargas Llosa won the Nobel, I kept thinking I really should read him; I really should already have read him. I'm glad I finally got around to it. (I still want to read Conversation in a Cathedral.) Anyway, the thing I liked most in The Storyteller is the idea of walking as a way of life. The book is about a writer's fascination with the Machiguenga indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon. The mythologies as presented in the book provide cosmological explanations of why the Machiguenga must always be moving, but what appealed to me was the idea of continuous movement as the preferred and natural state. Any time the people are lulled into complacency and start to settle down, bad things begin to happen. This is a reminder that they shouldn't stop walking. It's a subtle distinction, but something about the idea of continuing to walk to preserve peace or balance or what-have-you, versus being forced to move on because of conditions where you have settled, was really moving for me, even though the effect was the same.

So, this has been the first edition of "What I Liked Most About the Book." I hope there will be many more this year!

2015 in Books

Goodreads has made compiling this list so easy. I could just link to my year in books and be done with it. But I won't. I read 40 books this year:

• The Silence of the Sea by Vercors
• Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
• Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar
• Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño
• Broken Harbor by Tana French
• Quicksand by Nella Larsen
• The Shooting Party by Isabel Colgate
• Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• The Healing of America by T.R. Reid
• Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
• Life with Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
• Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry
• The Garden Next Door by José Donoso
• Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson
• Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Luis Zafón
• The Whispering Mountain by Joan Aiken
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• Requiem for a Glass Heart by David Lindsey
• The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
• Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
• 4:50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie
• Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Four Hands by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
• Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli
• Kinshu: Autumn Brocade by Teru Miyamoto
• Almost Never by Daniel Sada
• Leon Trotsky by Irving Howe
• No Happy Ending by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
• Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
• Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh
• One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
• Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke
• Nemesis by Jo Nesbø
• The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
• A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
• Mifanwy: A Welsh Singer by Allen Raine

Some stats:

• 15 books are by women 
• 26 books are by men (The Locked Room gets double counted)
• 14 books are in translation
• 3 books are nonfiction
• I read authors from 17 countries
• I read 9 books by American authors

I have a book club to thank for all my nonfiction reading this year. My reading choices over the last 4 months of the year were influenced by my decision to attempt to read a book from every country in the world, which I wrote about last month, though I was already reading pretty internationally in the first part of the year. Aside from the international books, there are two big, new trends in my reading this year:

1. I read a lot of short stories. Prior to 2015, I avoided short stories and claimed not to like them. At the start of 2015, I decided to read mostly short stories. I was trying to write more and I thought it would help if I wasn't always in the midst of reading some big book. I think it kind of worked, though I slacked off on writing a couple months into the year. I brought a book of short stories with me on vacation in April and decided they were the perfect form for reading while traveling (though I didn't take short story books on any of my subsequent trips). I tend not to read much when I'm traveling and several times I've found myself lugging around some large novel that I'm in the middle of, barely picking it up during the trip, and coming home after the trip having to reacquaint myself with the book. Short stories are the perfect thing for picking up occasionally when one has down time over the course of a trip.
2. I read a lot of detective novels. Eight of them to be exact. I never read detective novels before a few years ago and this is definitely the most I've read in a year. I probably read more this year than I had in all previous years combined. A few years ago I started watching detective shows on TV and I discovered that they had everything I wanted in a television program. There was drama, suspense, sometimes romance, and everything wrapped up satisfactorily in 90 minutes at the most. (I don't like the shows that don't solve the crime at the end of the episode.) Anyway, I decided I should maybe give detective novels a shot too and I liked them too. Most of the novels I've read are a bit darker than the detective TV programs I enjoy, but I have a lot more tolerance for dark books than I do for dark television.

Anyway, on to my favorite books of the year! There is a tie and a close third as well:

Tied for favorite books of the year are Explosion in a Cathedral and The Garden Next Door. I picked up The Garden Next Door at the end of May from a thrift store. I didn't know anything about it and wasn't familiar with the author, but I bought it on a whim. I started it a couple days later and it just so happened that the date that it was in the book was also that day's date, June 2. As I read the book there were all sorts of little coincidences like that and it felt totally magical as I was reading it. So I loved the book, but it almost feels like some of that was up to chance. I read the book at the right time and it was perfect. Explosion in a Cathedral was a book I'd long been aware of, but also knew nothing about really. I picked it up in July for $1.50 at a used book barn in upstate New York. If you're not familiar with it, Explosion in a Cathedral is a novel about the period leading up to and during the French Revolution and the Terror set mostly in the French Caribbean, largely about Victor Hugues, who was the governor of Guadeloupe (among other things). It was both beautifully written and a fascinating history of how the French Revolution, and the Terror, manifested in the colonies and the idealism followed by hypocrisy of the revolutionaries when it came to slavery. It was just a fascinating book and it kind of blew my mind. The close third is Wolf Hall. It was beautifully told and gave me such tender feelings toward Thomas Cromwell.

Other honorable mentions: 

• The Shooting Party, which was lovely and is apparently one of the inspirations for Downton Abbey. 
• Case Histories, which was probably my favorite detective novel of the year. 
• Kinshu: Autumn Brocade, a lovely Japanese epistolary novel. 
• Kiss of the Spider Woman, which is just incredibly told and unlike anything I've ever read, really.
• Mifanwy, which I squeezed in at the very end of the year to fill two requirements: a new country (Wales) and pre-1900 (1896!) -- aside from some uncomfortable colorism, it was a perfect 19th century romance and really evocative of Wales! And is available free from Google Books.

One more fun fact: I read two books ~on my phone~ this year, which is a first for me. 

Ok... on to 2016! I've already finished 2 books this year.